Saturday, December 14, 2013

The War on Constitutional Rights

The war on the Tea Party, much more than a rhetorical offensive,
continues unabated months after the putatively non-partisan Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) – the guys and gals that audit you to make sure you are paying
your “fair share” to support your president, your U.S. Congress and your
federal courts – had targeted tea party political groups for punitive audits.

The same “death to the Bill of Rights” progressives at the
U.S. Treasury Department have now promulgated rules that will, they hope, insure the extinction of
the political sons and daughters of Sam Adams, John Adams, Patrick Henry,
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and – coming closer to Connecticut -- Roger Sherman, William Samuel Johnson,
William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, Lyman Hall and the authors of Connecticut’s
1818 “Declaration of Rights,” Governor Oliver Wolcott Jr. among them, which declares in section 4:

“Every citizen may freely speak,
write and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the
abuse of that liberty.”

And in section 5:

“No law shall ever be passed to
curtail or restrain the liberty of speech or of the press.”

“The citizens have a right, in a
peaceable manner, to assemble for their common good, and to apply to those
invested with the powers of government, for redress of grievances, or other
proper purposes, by petition, address or remonstrance.”

No one in Connecticut surrendered such rights and
immunities, many of which are also mentioned in the U.S. Bill of Rights, when
the state moved into the 21st century, which has turned out to be far less
liberating than the 18th, the crucible of the Declaration of
Independence, the U.S Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For some reason, a muscular
federal agency, this time the U.S. Treasury Department, now feels comfortable
in abolishing such rights through administrative edict.

“In the media blackout of Thanksgiving week, the Treasury
Department dumped a new proposal to govern the political activity of 501(c)(4)
groups.”

U.S. House Ways and
Means Committee investigators are concerned that the new regulation “was
reverse-engineered—designed to isolate and shut down the same tea party groups
victimized in the first targeting round. Treasury appears to have combed
through those tea party applications, compiled all the groups' main activities,
and then restricted those activities in the new rule.”

Here’s how the constitutionally dubious attempt by Barack
Obama’s White House and Tea Party averse Democratic Congressmen to overthrow commonly
accepted constitutional immunities will work:

“To get or keep tax-exempt status,
501(c)(4) organizations must devote a majority of their work to their
"primary" social-welfare purpose. Most tea party groups were set up
with a primary purpose of educating Americans on pressing problems—the size of
government, the erosion of the Constitution—and did so mainly via nonpartisan
voter guides, speakers forums, pamphlets or voter-registration drives.

“What the proposed Treasury/IRS
regulation would do is to re-categorize all these efforts as "political
activity"—thereby making it all but impossible for tea party groups to
qualify for 501(c)(4) status. Say an outfit's primary purpose is educating
voters on our unsustainable debt, which it does mainly with a guide explaining
the problem and politicians' voting records. Under the new rule, that guide is
now "political activity" (rather than "social welfare"),
which likely loses the group tax-exempt status.”

Here is a question that ought to be put to every citizen of
the “Constitution State,” not excluding the state’s governor, members of the
General Assembly, jurists, members of the state’s media and little children
studying, one hopes, the once proud history of Connecticut: Are were really
prepared in this brand spanking new century to allow a poorly administered
federal bureaucracy to deprive, through an ill-conceived administrative regulation,
the people of this state of rights and immunities in defense of which all the
political heroes mentioned in this column were willing to give their last drop
of blood?